


a private reason for this

by oopshidaisy



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Fluff, Intricate Rituals, M/M, POV Outsider, The Goddamn Hammock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 06:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20653004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oopshidaisy/pseuds/oopshidaisy
Summary: Back when they were kids, Richie and Eddie got into something of a routine.





	a private reason for this

**Author's Note:**

> title is from w.h. auden's poem 'at last the secret is out'. the full line is "there is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this." fuck you, pennywise

Stan was going to develop the eye equivalent of carpal tunnel if he kept rolling them so much, he was sure of it. It was just that as the summer dragged on and Richie became even more hyperactive than he had been before, and the bizarre situation between Bill, Bev and Ben showed no signs of letting up, and Eddie seemed incapable of letting ten seconds pass without bickering with Richie—Stan loved them all, but he was close to reaching his limit. He glanced across their hideout at Mike, his only companion in sanity, and raised his eyebrows. Right now, they were in the middle of a rare quiet spell, which meant that Richie and Eddie were throwing brightly wrapped pieces of candy at each other (and pretending that Eddie’s foot wasn’t hooked around Richie’s ankle) while Ben hovered awkwardly behind Bill and Bev, who were putting the finishing touches to a model airplane Bill had found under his bed.

It was Stan’s turn on the hammock, with seven minutes of his turn to go. He didn’t actually like it much, but it was one of the funny little traditions that they’d developed over the past month, each taking their turn on the hammock until Richie and Eddie started hogging it. Which, Stan had to admit, was the catalyst behind at least half of the eye-rolling.

If it had only been the once, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. He was fairly sure the less observant of their compatriots (that was, everyone except Bev) _still _didn’t think anything of it. In actual fact, he wasn’t even sure if Richie and Eddie had noticed anything strange about the routine.

It went like this: Richie’s turn was second to last, and he would lounge there for his ten minutes, during which Eddie’s eyes could not be torn away for love nor money. Then, the second the ten minutes were up, Eddie would demand to have his turn. Richie refused, and Eddie found some new way to squash himself onto the remaining space.

This had happened every day for a month.

Stan knew it would be impolite to say anything. God knew Richie kept joking about all the girls he was supposedly going to fourth with to compensate for the way he spent more time than not hanging off Eddie, poking his cheek to get his attention, calling him cute.

What Stan didn’t know was how Eddie could stand the full force of Richie’s attention like that. Despite having been friends with him for as long as he could remember, he’d never actually seen Richie focus on one thing for so long before. Before whatever this thing was with Eddie, Richie wasn’t even capable of finishing one of his comics in one sitting. Normally he flitted from person to person and subject to subject with all the constancy of a drunk fruit fly. It was almost painful to watch the way he’d started to treat Eddie like his center of gravity, like the axis upon which Richie spun.

A couple of weeks ago, when the two of them were wrestling in the grass, shrieking insults at each other, Ben had turned to Stan and asked, “Should we stop them?”

Stan had looked at him, and then back to where Eddie was ineffectually tugging at Richie’s hair while Richie tried unsuccessfully to kick himself to freedom.

“They’re fine,” he’d said.

“Really?” Bill had responded. “It’s just, sometimes it really seems like they hate each other.”

Stan had choked on a laugh. “Trust me,” he said. “They don’t.”

It wasn’t that Stan didn’t know the terminology for what Richie and Eddie were. He’d heard them all – mainly from Henry Bowers, but also from his dad, who sometimes mentioned the ‘pansies’ and ‘fairies’ within Stan’s earshot. It didn’t bother Stan much that they were fairies, in the same way it didn’t bother him that Bill kept mooning over Bev. What he wondered was what – or how long – it would take for Richie Tozier to call himself gay.

And Stan would have had ample opportunity to bring it up with Richie, if he knew how. They spent enough time together; their parents were friends, after all, and they were constantly in and out of each other’s houses. But it felt grown-up, and scary – far more so than it would have been if Richie had had a crush on some girl. Stan was fully aware that however much Richie loved Eddie (and he was sure that was the right word for it, instinctively; it wasn’t to be written off as some childish crush or phase) and however much Eddie loved him back, they’d end up having a shit time of it. He tried to imagine them going back to school in September, holding hands in the halls like the older boys and their girlfriends sometimes did. It was inconceivable.

So he said nothing, and hoped against hope they'd work it out on their own.

He watched as Richie caught the lemon sherbet Eddie had just chucked at him in his mouth. Richie gave a triumphant cry, raising his arms above his head, even though Stan knew he hated the taste of lemon. When he settled his hands back on the floor, Stan couldn’t help but notice that his pinkie finger rested less than an inch away from Eddie’s.

Just because Stan’s eye rolls were fond more often than not didn’t mean he wasn’t in real medical danger.

“Hey, Richie, it’s your turn,” he said, watching the last of the sand drain out of the timer Eddie had brought to ‘keep things fair.’

“Stan, my man!” Richie grinned, jumping on top of him. Stan didn’t have to look up to know that Eddie was glaring.

“Get off,” he groaned, wriggling out from under all twenty feet of Richie’s flailing, mid-growth spurt limbs. “You know I’m not Eddie, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie squeaked indignantly.

Stan shrugged, meeting his gaze calmly. “Maybe you’re small enough to fit on this thing with him, but I’m sure as fuck not. _Richie_, get _off_.”

Richie, who’d gone uncharacteristically still, did an abrupt and dramatic forward roll onto the ground, yelping when he hit his shoulder at a weird angle on the way down. “Fuck!”

“You’re an idiot,” Eddie sniffed.

“Right, right,” Richie muttered, heaving himself off the ground and switching places with Stan. “See you in ten minutes, princess.”

Eddie made a sound like a screeching violin and grabbed Richie’s Batman comic, holding it threateningly aloft as though he wasn’t the shortest person in the room. “Don’t call me that!”

Richie lay back on the hammock, arms crossed behind his head. There was a somewhat manic glint in his eye. “Of course, sweet-cheeks.”

Sometimes it was impossible not to watch Richie and Eddie as though they were a particularly intense tennis match. Even Bill and Bev were looking up from their craft project; Bev was openly laughing at the way Eddie had turned an interesting shade of red. To a casual observer, Richie might have appeared unconcerned, but Stan could see the restless beat his fingers were drumming against his thigh. Richie had too many tells for someone who was hiding so much, he thought.

“You,” Eddie gritted out, “are a cunt.”

Richie’s answering laugh was loud and bright; he always appeared genuinely delighted when Eddie called him names.

“Yeah, talk dirty to me, baby,” Richie said, and Stan could see the cracks in the false bravado but he doubted anyone else could – Richie was doing one of his particularly annoying machismo Voices, and that covered for a lot. “Though you’re not quite as good as your mo—”

Eddie gave a little war-cry and jumped to tackle Richie, his knee appearing to land square on Richie’s diaphragm.

“Careful!” Ben shouted, his eyes fixed on the wooden beams the hammock was tied to.

Stan wasn’t all too concerned with the integrity of the structure, since Eddie’s plan appeared to involve sitting atop Richie’s stomach and slapping at him while Richie laughed.

Stan glanced heavenward. They’d settle down in a few minutes, he knew (or one of them would fall off) but it still felt almost invasive to be watching them—seeing the open fragility of whatever it was between them.

He turned around to grab the battered box of Monopoly they kept in the corner, setting it down decisively in front of Mike.

“Beginning to feel like a fifth wheel?” Mike asked, and Stan mentally revised his list of people who knew what was going on. Shit, maybe it was obvious to all of them by this point. “Or did you just want me to kick your ass at this game again?”

“I’ll get you one of these days,” Stan shrugged.

He managed to block out the white noise of Richie and Eddie’s bickering while he set up the board and pieces, and his silver thimble had passed GO (collected two-hundred dollars) four times before he looked up again, realizing the two in the hammock had gone uncharacteristically quiet.

At the sight of them, his mouth curved into a small smile. Eddie had shifted around, his back resting against Richie’s chest, head tipped to nestle into his shoulder. There was plausible deniability in the shape of the comic, which they could claim to be reading, but Stan thought it more significant that Richie’s fingers were carding absently through the strands of Eddie’s hair, that their legs were inextricably tangled together.

For the few minutes that Stan spent watching them, they didn’t turn the page of the comic once.

**Author's Note:**

> can't believe the clown movie kids got me
> 
> i can be found on tumblr @[morgans-starks](https://morgans-starks.tumblr.com/)


End file.
